If you are looking for the best free Helvetica alternatives you are in the right place. If you’re looking for a free alternative to Helvetica, there are plenty of great fonts to choose from. Here are some of our favorites.
Helvetica is one of the most popular typefaces in the world. It is a clean, efficient typeface that lends clarity to any typographic message. The original typeface was called Neue Haas Grotesk, and was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger. In 1960, the name was changed to Helvetica (an adaptation of Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland).
Helvetica has a narrow aperture, which makes it difficult to read onscreen or at small print sizes. It also has no visible difference between the upper-case ‘I’ and the lower-case ‘L’. The number 1 is quite identifiable, because it has a flag at the top-left corner. Its tight, display-oriented spacing may also pose problems for legibility.
Arial
Arial is a most similar Helvetica alternative; it is default font on both Windows and Mac OS operative systems. Arial is one of the most common typefaces in the world. It’s used in everything from headings to body text, making it one of the most versatile typefaces around.
Arial is a sans serif font that is contemporary in style. It contains more humanist characteristics than many other sans serif fonts, which makes it more appropriate for the mood of the later decades of the 20th century. The curves are softer and more full than in other industrial fonts, and the terminal strokes are cut on a diagonal, which gives the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is extremely versatile and can be used for both text and display settings.
TeX Gyre Heros Font
The TeX Gyre Heros family of sans-serif fonts is based on the URW Nimbus Sans L family, which is distributed with Ghostscript. The original font, Helvetica, was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger in cooperation with Eduard Hoffman at the Haas type foundry. The constituent 8 faces (4 standard and 4 condensed) each contain nearly 1250 glyphs.
UNB Font
UnB institutional typographic families were developed from the Liberation Sans type family. Liberation Sans was selected for its technical quality and its similarity to the typographic families previously used.
Free helvetica alternatives from google fonts:
Roboto sans-serif
Roboto sans-serif is ulta popular free google font and it’s a great Helvetica alternative. Roboto has two distinct aspects. Its mechanical skeleton and largely geometric forms give it a mechanical feel, while the open curves make it friendlier. Unlike other grotesque fonts which distort letterforms to create a rigid rhythm, Roboto doesn’t compromise, allowing letters to be spaced naturally. This creates a more natural reading rhythm, similar to that found in humanist and serif fonts.
Arimo Font
Arimo was designed by Steve Matteson as a sans serif font that is metrically compatible with Arial. Arimo offers improved on-screen readability and the pan-European WGL character set. This font is perfect for developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.
Source Sans Pro
Source Sans Pro was designed by Paul D. Hunt to be an open source typeface family that is easy to read. It was inspired by twentieth-century American gothic typeface designs, which were known for their clarity and legibility. To make the typeface easier to differentiate, some additional details were added to similar letter shapes (such as uppercase I and lowercase L). Source Sans Pro was also designed with a more generous width than many other comparable gothics, and its shorter majuscule letters, combined with minuscule letters with longer extenders, create a more pleasant reading texture in longer text passages.
Work Sans
Work Sans is a typeface family that is based on early Grotesques, such as those from Stephenson Blake, Miller & Richard, and Bauerschen Giesserei. The Regular weight and others in the middle of the family are optimized for on-screen text usage at medium-sizes (14px-48px) and can also be used in print design. The fonts closer to the extreme weights are designed more for display use both on the web and in print. Overall, features are simplified and optimized for screen resolutions; for example, diacritic marks are larger than they would be in print.
IBM Plex Sans
IBM Plex is an international typeface family that was designed by Mike Abbink, IBM BX&D, in collaboration with Bold Monday, an independent Dutch type foundry. Plex was designed to capture IBM’s spirit and history, and to illustrate the unique relationship between mankind and machine—a principal theme for IBM since the turn of the century. The result is a neutral, yet friendly Grotesque style typeface that includes a Sans, Sans Condensed, Mono, Serif, and several other styles for several languages, and has excellent legibility in print, web, and mobile interfaces. Plex’s three designs work well independently, and even better together. Use the Sans as a contemporary compadre, the Serif for editorial storytelling, or the Mono to show code snippets. The unexpectedly expressive nature of the italics give you even more options for your designs.
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